Starting in May, Connects will cost $0.15 each, with no free Connects for agencies and freelancers _ Stephane Kasriel, Upwork CEO

Since May 2019, No more Upwork free Connects for agencies and freelancers. This is a good step upwork taken after a long wait because upwork 6o free connects for the freelancers were a problem for the professional and active members. There is a huge crowd of copy pasters who are not only annoying the clients but a disappointment factor for the professional freelancers.

As soon as a job is posted, you can notice 50+ proposals in just a few minuts. Actually there are huge amount of beginners or non professionals who simply copy paste proposal without understanding the requirements and just try to get client’s attention with template proposal using very very low price that is a big disappointment for the real full time professionals at upwork.

Before you understand a posted job and its requirements, you see a flood of submitted proposals and you just ignore the job becasue there is very very less chances for the client to read all proposals. As a result, the client is unable to select the best freelancer or sometimes the client selects incompetent or fake freelancers if there is very low price offered for a variety of jobs.

Why Elance was better than upwrok?

If you are new to freelance work and came into the business after 2015, You can’t realize it but the fact is, Elance was far better than upwork as there were brilliant performers for the best clients around the world. A freelancer was able to be hired very easily on Elance. Only 10 connects was allowed in Elance Free membership plan. Every freelancer was to submit proposal after understanding exact job requirements. No crowd was there. Hardly 15 to 20 proposals on each posted job. Most of the times job was awarded any one between 1 to 10 proposals. Minimum Website Design and development price was about $300+.  That was a great time to establish a freelance portfolio both for individual and Agency.

Does upwork meat the best freelance job board requirements?

Upwork is a merger of two giants freelance job marketplaces, Elance and Odesk. Now Tere are millions of individual and Agency freelance profiles but most of them beginner, non-professional even a large number of “Fake Freelancers” who just submit copy pasted templated proposals with lowest price to take the job. They not only submit many proposals on a sinle job but deceive the client with different rates in each proposal. Most of the time they don’t complete the job and never respond to the client that makes a client disappointed and post the job somewere else.

So the recently taken decision for removing free connects by upwork, from individual and freelance agency will help in retaining professional freelancers in the network with better pricing and high quality work. Although there will still be a large number of copy paste freelancers but gradually the performance will be better accordingly.

To learn more about Upwork Connects, read this comprehensive guide

Do write your thoughts in comments if you think it is a good or bad decision.